A fortnight (two weeks) before school was scheduled to begin, Harry was jolted awake after a strange and terrifying dreams and his hands immediately shot to his scar. It was burning to bad as if someone had held a paperclip over a flame and pressed it into his skin.

He bit his lip to keep from crying out and he could taste blood from how hard his teeth bit into the fragile pink skin. He thought about waking Snape, but knew that it would worry the man if he knew that Harry’s curse scar was giving him pain.

So he needed to get rid of this pain and a pain relief potion was out of the question. He also wanted to get the dream images out of his head… watching an innocent old man getting killed for no reason. It almost made him want to sick up.

That’s when Harry remembered the raggedy pillow he’s brought from his cupboard and what he had hidden in it. Dudley was a total pothead and Harry never minded it. When Dudley was stone, he was much more calm and didn’t bother with beating Harry up. One time when Harry was cleaning Dudley’s room, he found the stash and he had filched a few joints from him. Harry hadn’t had any terrible motives behind the theft. He wasn’t planning on using drugs recreationally. He’d just wanted to spite Dudley in some way. But he’d heard about cancer patients using marijuana for pain relief and Dudley had once told him that it made everything seem better when he was in a bad mood. It seemed like a good reason to save the joints. He knew the Dursleys would never give him anything for pain if he so needed it. That was all Harry knew about drugs and it seemed to fit his situation at the current moment.

While he thought about his choices, Harry forced his eyes open and pulled his hands away from his scar. According to the darkness outside, it was still night. There was no way he would bother Snape out of a night’s sleep.

The decision was made and Harry rolled over and reached for the pillow hidden under his mattress. He unzipped it and a small plastic baggie with two rolled joints fell out. His stomach gave a twist, reminding Harry that was he was doing was not considered ‘okay’. If it had been okay then Dudley wouldn’t have demanded Harry to keep quiet and never tell Vernon or Petunia about it. Harry knew drugs were wrong, but he just couldn’t figure out why they were so bad. They seemed to make people happy enough.

He ignored the uncomfortable feeling in his gut, the pain in his head far outweighed it, and he grabbed one joint and stumbled out of bed and out of his room. On his way down the stairs, he tried to think of a way to light the thing. He couldn’t use his want in the summer and he didn’t own a lighter- oh! Snape always had a box of matches in the lab for when he had to heat a magic-sensitive potion.

Quietly and very paranoid, Harry snuck into the lab and quickly grabbed one match and headed outside. Once out o the back porch, he struck the match against the stone wall of the house. He hesitated as his pulse nervously thundered in his neck. Then he saw in his mind the ugly green light and he forgot about his nerves. He brought the flame up to the marijuana cigarette that he held to his mouth and he breathed in to get it lit.

He immediately gagged on the horrible taste that filled his mouth. It tasted as if he had just grabbed a pile of dirt and eaten it.

“Bloody hell…” he muttered. This time he braced himself for the gross taste and he did as he’d seen Dudley do many times. He breathed in a drag and then held it for a moment before letting it out with a small cough. With a small shrug, he repeated the process several times until he was finished and then he smushed what was left into the ground and kicked a little dirt over it.

“… And there is nothing.” Harry sighed, not feeling any different. He assumed that maybe it had lost it’s potency just sitting in his pillow all that time, but he still had no desire to go back into the house to sleep. He didn’t want the dream to come back. He wandered down to the benches that surrounded the Salazar statue and sat down.

A few seconds or minutes after sitting down, Harry was overwhelmed with a flush of heat and a sensation that he was tipping to the side, but he could clearly see that he wasn’t. He reveled in that falling feeling a bit, closing his eyes once in a while to make it feel more intense. He realized then that the drug must have finally come into affect. He wasn’t sure how long he sat there, but eventually he decided to move from his seat near the statue and he stood up to walk down to the lake.

It was so strange, this feeling almost like vertigo but without the dizzying effects. Then Harry noticed as he walked very purposefully that each step he took felt like it took forever but when it ended, it felt as if it had happened so fast. He was so fascinated by his own footsteps and the slight time distortion that he almost didn’t notice he’d already started walking on the wooden dock on the lake.

If he hadn’t noticed where he was already, he probably would have fallen in the lake and he would have been screwed. He never learned how to swim and so he would have surely drowned. The morbid though made him giggle a little and he knew somewhere in side that it was definitely not funny and that laughing was probably not an appropriate reaction to thoughts of his death, but he quickly forgot about it as he plopped down to watch the rippling waves in the water.

He dipped his bare feet in the water and noticed that every time the ripples change, he could find pictures in the water. Some of the pictures amused him… like the one of the man with squid arms. He watched the pictures for a while as they changed, making him chuckle every so often.

Suddenly he remembered the reason he’d smoked the pot in the first place… but it didn’t seem to bother him as much as it did before. It wasn’t as if the dream was real anyways. He realized that his scar didn’t even hurt anymore… actually, when he reached up to rub at it, he realized he couldn’t even feel it. With this little discovery, Harry pinched his arm. He could feel it, but just barely. His numbness kind of annoyed Harry, but only a little.

----

Severus slowly became aware of a clanging noise inside his head that signaled the wards on his lab being broken. He’d set the wards right before he retrieved Harry from the muggles, remembering the kid’s insatiable curiosity and his knack for getting into trouble. After he’d gotten to know Harry a little better, he didn’t see the need for the wards and had almost forgotten about them until just now.

He figured now that Harry had probably had a nightmare of some sort and didn’t want to bother Severus for a Dreamless Sleep Potion and so set off in search for one on his own. It had to been Harry as the property wards were still in place, making sure that nobody stepped foot on Severus’s property without first gaining permission.

There was no need to hurry then, so Severus took time to find and slip on his robe and slippers. He was aware that he looked nothing like the intimidating persona he’d taken years to perfect, but he didn’t mind since he was trying to distance himself from that person for Harry.

He plodded down the stairs and went to his lab. He opened the door and saw that the room was empty. Harry’d already left it. So he went back upstairs to check for Harry in his bedroom and try to talk to him. It was also empty and he was about to turn back to continue his search, but he spotted something on Harry’s bed.

He went over to the bed and picked up a small baggie that had been left.

“Damn,” he sighed. One marijuana joint. “Damn, damn, damn.”

He knew Harry hadn’t smoked it in the room because there was no trace of the telltale smell that marijuana left. But the boy was obviously doing drugs.

Fuming, Severus stormed back to his room and exchanged his slippers for shoes and then hurried back downstairs and through the solarium to the back yard. His nose wrinkled in disgust from the lingering smell on the patio. From where he stood, he could just barely see the form of Harry sitting on the dock under the moonlight. He muttered several profanities as he stomped down the path to the lake.

“Harry James Potter!” he yelled when he neared the water.

Harry turned to face him, his feet ripping up out of the water and his torso swaying as he almost lost his balance and fell backwards. He caught himself in time and turned his dilated red eyes upwards.

“Yeah?”

For a moment, Severus was struck speechless. He was deeply angry but this was a situation he had not thought to prepare for and now the boy didn’t even have the decency to realize he was in trouble.

With a small growl, Severus held up the baggie that he hadn’t let go of yet. That’s when Harry’s drugged up mind finally got up with the situation.

“Oh.”

“Oh? You’ve just been caught with muggle drugs and you say ‘oh’? What were you thinking? You’re just a child. You can’t afford to screw yourself up with-”

“I’m not a child.”

Severus fixed Harry with a glare that would make any other student wet themselves.

“You are only fourteen… a child. What would possess you to do this? Have you been getting high behind my back this whole time?”

“No. It was the first time… my first time ever.”

“Why? Why now?”

“Because it hurt!” Harry was standing now; close enough to Severus that the sickly sweet smell surrounding Harry made Severus take a step back.

“What hurt?”

“All of it. His face when the light hit and… ugh, and the snake and Pettigrew was there. And then my scar… And it was too much so I remembered that I took them from Dudley and he said they make it better so I tried to make it better and it worked!”

“What?” He wasn’t able to make much sense of Harry’s fragmented story.

“The dream.”

“A dream? You went and did drugs because of a dream? That’s… I don’t even know how I am to respond to that! Just… go to your room. We’ll discuss a proper punishment in the morning. I can’t deal with you while I’m this angry.”

“It never stopped you before.” Harry smirked.

“Harry, just go.”

“No. I won’t go back in there just to sleep again.”

“Yes, you will.”

“No, I bloody won’t. Stop telling me what to do! You may be my guardian, but you’re not my father!’

“YES, I AM!” Severus exploded.

Everything went still for a moment until Harry leaned forward and narrowed his eyes.

“What?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to come out that way. I’ve been waiting for the right time to-”

“No, stop… just stop.” Harry held up his hands. He stared at Severus with disgust and disbelief. “You… you’re cracked,” he muttered. Without anything more, Harry shoved passed Severus and ran up to the house, leaving the man alone.

“Merlin… now what, Marguerite? This isn’t how it was supposed to be.”